No Intrinsic Decoherence of Inflationary Cosmological Perturbations

After a brief summary of the four main veins in the treatment of decoherence and quantum to classical transition in cosmology since the 1980s, we focus on one of these veins in the study of quantum decoherence of cosmological perturbations in inflationary universe, the case when it does not rely on any environment. This is what ‘intrinsic’ in the title refers to—a closed quantum system, consisting of a quantum field which drives inflation. The question is whether its quantum perturbations, which interact with the density contrast giving rise to structures in the universe, decohere with an inflationary expansion of the universe. A dominant view which had propagated for a quarter of a century asserts yes, based on the belief that the large squeezing of a quantum state after a duration of inflation renders the system effectively classical. This paper debunks this view by identifying the technical fault-lines in its derivations and revealing the pitfalls in its arguments which drew earlier authors to this wrong conclusion. We use a few simple quantum mechanical models to expound where the fallacy originated: The highly squeezed ellipse quadrature in phase space cannot be simplified to a line, and the Wigner function cannot be replaced by a delta function. These measures amount to taking only the leading order in the relevant parameters in seeking the semiclassical limit and ignoring the subdominant contributions where quantum features reside. Doing so violates the bounds of the Wigner function, and its wave functions possess negative eigenvalues. Moreover, the Robertson-Schrödinger uncertainty relation for a pure state is violated. For inflationary cosmological perturbations, in addition to these features, entanglement exists between the created pairs. This uniquely quantum feature cannot be easily argued away. Indeed, it could be our best hope to retroduce the quantum nature of cosmological perturbations and the trace of an inflation field. All this points to the invariant fact that a closed quantum system, even when highly squeezed, evolves unitarily without loss of coherence; quantum cosmological perturbations do not decohere by themselves.

Effect of the Cubic Torus Topology on Cosmological Perturbations

We study the effect of the cubic torus topology of the Universe on scalar cosmological perturbations which define the gravitational potential. We obtain three alternative forms of the solution for both the gravitational potential produced by point-like masses, and the corresponding force. The first solution includes the expansion of delta-functions into Fourier series, exploiting periodic boundary conditions. The second one is composed of summed solutions of the Helmholtz equation for the original mass and its images. Each of these summed solutions is the Yukawa potential. In the third formula, we express the Yukawa potentials via Ewald sums. We show that for the present Universe, both the bare summation of Yukawa potentials and the Yukawa-Ewald sums require smaller numbers of terms to yield the numerical values of the potential and the force up to desired accuracy. Nevertheless, the Yukawa formula is yet preferable owing to its much simpler structure.

Dirac procedure and the Hamiltonian formalism for cosmological perturbations in a Bianchi I universe

We apply the Dirac procedure for constrained systems to the Arnowitt-Deser-Misner formalism linearized around the Bianchi I universe. We discuss and employ basic concepts such as Dirac observables, Dirac brackets, gauge-fixing conditions, reduced phase space, physical Hamiltonian, canonical isomorphism between different gauge-fixing surfaces and spacetime reconstruction. We relate this approach to the gauge-fixing procedure for non-perturbative canonical relativity. We discuss the issue of propagating a basis for the scalar-vector-tensor decomposition as, in an anisotropic universe, the wavefronts of plane waves undergo a non-trivial evolution. We show that the definition of a gravitational wave as a traceless-transverse mode of the metric perturbation needs to be revised. Moreover there exist coordinate systems in which a polarization mode of the gravitational wave is given entirely in terms of a scalar metric perturbation. We first develop the formalism for the universe with a single minimally coupled scalar field and then extend it to the multi-field case. The obtained fully canonical formalism will serve as a starting point for a complete quantization of the cosmological perturbations and the cosmological background.

Intrinsic Entropy of Squeezed Quantum Fields and Nonequilibrium Quantum Dynamics of Cosmological Perturbations

Density contrasts in the universe are governed by scalar cosmological perturbations which, when expressed in terms of gauge-invariant variables, contain a classical component from scalar metric perturbations and a quantum component from inflaton field fluctuations. It has long been known that the effect of cosmological expansion on a quantum field amounts to squeezing. Thus, the entropy of cosmological perturbations can be studied by treating them in the framework of squeezed quantum systems. Entropy of a free quantum field is a seemingly simple yet subtle issue. In this paper, different from previous treatments, we tackle this issue with a fully developed nonequilibrium quantum field theory formalism for such systems. We compute the covariance matrix elements of the parametric quantum field and solve for the evolution of the density matrix elements and the Wigner functions, and, from them, derive the von Neumann entropy. We then show explicitly why the entropy for the squeezed yet closed system is zero, but is proportional to the particle number produced upon coarse-graining out the correlation between the particle pairs. We also construct the bridge between our quantum field-theoretic results and those using the probability distribution of classical stochastic fields by earlier authors, preserving some important quantum properties, such as entanglement and coherence, of the quantum field.

Cosmological Perturbations via Quantum Corrections in M-Theory

In the early universe, it is important to take into account the quantum effect of gravity to explain the feature of inflation. In this paper, we consider the M-theory effective action which consists of 11-dimensional supergravity and (Weyl)4 terms. The equations of motion are solved perturbatively, and the solution describes the inflation-like expansion in 4-dimensional spacetime. Equations of motion for tensor perturbations around this background are derived perturbatively. We also check that the equations of motion are obtained from the effective action up to the second order of the perturbations. Finally, we solve the equations of motion for the tensor perturbations perturbatively and obtain analytic expressions for them.

Relic gravitational waves in cosmological models based on the modified gravity theories

We consider cosmological models based on the generalized scalar-tensor gravity, which correspond to the observational constraints on the parameters of cosmological perturbations for any model’s parameters. The estimates of the energy density of relic gravitational waves for such a cosmological models were made. The possibility of direct detection of such a gravitational waves using modern and prospective methods was discussed as well.

Interacting dynamical dark energy with stable high-scale cosmological perturbations at radiation-dominated epoch

In this paper, the cosmological perturbations of dynamical dark energy and dark matter, which interact non-gravitationally are studied. This dark energy–dark matter non-gravitational interaction is linearly dependent on the energy densities of dark components. However, in the interacting quintessence dark energy models with such type of interaction, the non-adiabatic instabilities of cosmological perturbations at radiation-dominated epoch arise. To avoid this problem, the model of dynamical dark energy was chosen as the basis. Here, the equation of state parameter of dark energy evolves in time but can be assumed constant at early epoch, so this model can be tuned in such a way that the non-adiabatic instabilities would not appear. The drawback of this cosmological model is that the energy densities of dark components can take the negative values for the certain range of interaction parameter, so the conditions for positivity of dark components densities were derived. Using obtained constraints on the model parameters, the impact of coupling parameter on modification of cosmological perturbations’ evolution is analyzed.